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Thursday, 10 July 2008

Pay Attention Microsoft: We Love XP!!!

Well, its finally time for me to upgrade my work computer after 3 years of intense work as a lab instructor. The basic specs on my old computer are; 3.0 GHZ Pentium 4 processor, 1 GB RAM, 120 GB hard drive, and Windows XP. The computer worked fine, and throughout its lifetime it was very stable but it was slowing down when starting to run memory intensive programs such as Google Earth and Corel Draw. My new computer will have an Athlon 3.0 GHZ dual core processor, 4 GB RAM, and 250 GB hard drive, and it will still have XP. YESSSS!!!! It will come with the Vista installation disks, but it is highly unlikely that I will install it unless vast improvements are made. After reading one of the CNETs blogs, I realize that I am not the only one refusing to buy/install Vista. For example, Intel has decided not to upgrade 80,000 desktops from Windows XP to Vista. I teach at a university and I see a larger proportion of Macs around and I hear one common quote, "I hate Vista, I would of bought a Mac if I had the extra money." Maybe with the amazing back to school deal (free iPod touch with purchase of a Macbook), I'll see even more Macs on campus.

My repulsion toward Vista is based on a brief experience, it was so bad I didn't want to go back. I was trying to use my simple and common 2 GB Kingston USB drive with a Vista Machine, I kept getting messages like "cannot find driver", eventually the machine locked up, and restarting still couldn't get the simple USB drive to work, BRUTAL!!! By no means am I a computer pro, but an operating system be intuitive, work with most current computers, and be able to handle most devices, so far Vista gets a failing grade in all of these. Vista has done Microsoft a ton of damage, I think it has led people to highly criticize anything that they release, and will be like this until they release a better operating system or some software that is just amazing. They better hurry up though, the Mac and Google people are picking away at the Microsoft market share, they realize that like consumers really like innovation, instead of the same ol' crap (sometimes worst) in a different package. On that note, my vacation has officially started, back in 2 weeks.